August 11, 2017

Salt

I studied German on a language course in Halle in the 1970s, and very interesting it was too. Halle was then part of the GDR, or East Germany. I never thought much about the meaning of the city's name -- die Halle is a German word, anyway, so nothing struck me as odd. But, in fact, the city's name Halle comes from a Celtic language. In an 1840s paper read to the Philological Society, entitled On the Languages and Dialects of the British Islands, the author, the Reverend Richard Garnett, notes that Halle was named after the Cymric or Armorican (or Welsh or Breton, as we would say nowadays) word for salt, hal or halen. The modern Welsh word for salt is halen. Reverend Garnett writes that parts of Germany were long occupied by Celtic tribes, many of whom were emigrants from Gaul. He also says that the names of a number of German places that were once involved in the salt-harvesting trade include the word 'hall'. German Wikipedia confirms this and gives other examples including Bad Reichenhall in Bavaria, Schwäbisch Hall (or simply Hall for short) in Baden-Württemberg, and the small town of Bad Hall in Austria.

The hal of the English word halogen means 'salt'; it comes from the Greek word for salt ἅλς.

Interestingly, names of some towns in England that are associated with salt production end in -wich, such as Nantwich, Northwich, Middlewich and Droitwich. The OED says that the original meaning of the word wich or wych may have referred to the group of buildings connected to a salt-pit, given that wīc in Old English meant dwelling-place. Wīc also meant bay or creek, according to John Clark Hall's Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, and in the 1889 book, Falling in Love: with Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science, Grant Hall writes this paragraph (I've copied it from Wikipedia, although the full text of the book is available online):

Our English salt supply is chiefly derived from the Cheshire and Worcestershire salt-regions, which are of triassic age. Many of the places at which the salt is mined have names ending in wich, such as Northwich, Middlewich, Nantwich, Droitwich, Netherwich, and Shirleywich. This termination wich is itself curiously significant, as Canon Isaac Taylor has shown, of the necessary connection between salt and the sea. The earliest known way of producing salt was of course in shallow pans on the sea-shore, at the bottom of a shoal bay, called in Norse and Early English a wick or wich; and the material so produced is still known in trade as bay-salt. By-and-by, when people came to discover the inland brine-pits and salt mines, they transferred to them the familiar name, a wich; and the places where the salt was manufactured came to be known as wych-houses. Droitwich, for example, was originally such a wich, where the droits or dues on salt were paid at the time when William the Conqueror's commissioners drew up their great survey for Domesday Book. But the good, easy-going mediæval people who gave these quaint names to the inland wiches had probably no idea that they were really and truly dried-up bays, and that the salt they mined from their pits was genuine ancient bay-salt, the deposit of an old inland sea, evaporated by slow degrees a countless number of ages since, exactly as the Dead Sea and the Great Salt Lake are getting evaporated in our own time.